1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to location-based applications for mobile devices and, more specifically, to a digital punch card for a mobile device based on one or more security conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
A primary goal of many consumer-based businesses, such as cafés, restaurants, dry cleaners, and clothing stores, is to attract and retain repeat customers. In order to achieve this goal, these businesses oftentimes offer “promotional punch cards” to their customers. For example, a café could offer a “buy 10 coffees get one free” promotion. In order to implement this promotion, the café would give a customer a punch card, typically the size of a business card, and mark the punch card every time the customer buys a cup of coffee. After the customer receives 10 marks on the punch card, she would present the card to the salesperson at the café, who would give her a free coffee.
While punch cards are convenient to the degree they increase customer loyalty and allow customers to save money, customers often misplace or damage their punch cards. As a result, customers are frequently unable to take full advantage of their punch cards, thereby undermining the business purposes underlying the use of punch cards.
To address the problems with conventional punch cards and to leverage the ubiquity of mobile devices, several mobile phone-based punch card applications have been developed. These mobile phone-based punch cards typically operate by scanning a barcode with a camera of the phone, with each scan of the barcode being equivalent to a mark on the punch card. One drawback of this approach is that mobile phone-based punch card applications rely heavily on customer honesty. For example, a customer could easily cheat such an application by scanning a copy of the barcode multiple times or reporting that she is at a false location. In other words, a dishonest customer could easily falsify her use of a digital punch card without actually purchasing any items from the business promoting the punch card, again undermining the business purposes underlying the use of the punch card.
Other mobile phone applications allow a user to “check in” to a location by typing a location name into the phone and broadcasting to her friends on a social networking website that she is at the location. However, such applications also are not very useful as a replacement for physical punch cards because a mobile phone user can easily falsify the location from where she is broadcasting, thereby undermining the business purposes underlying the use of punch cards due to the easy falsification.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more secure technique for implementing digital punch cards.